Written by Amador Daguio, I first read this during 3rd year college in our Short Story subject with Ma'am Linda Espinosa, then our Department Head. Since then, this has become my favorite short story by a Filipino writer.

Awiyao reached for the upper horizontal log which served as the edge
of the headhigh threshold. Clinging to the log, he lifted himself with
one bound that carried him across to the narrow door. He slid back the
cover, stepped inside, then pushed the cover back in place. After some
moments during which he seemed to wait, he talked to the listening
darkness.

“I’m sorry this had to be done. I am really sorry. But neither of us can help it.”

The sound of the gangsas beat through the walls of the dark house
like muffled roars of falling waters. The woman who had moved with a
start when the sliding door opened had been hearing the gangsas for she
did not know how long. There was a sudden rush of fire in her. She gave
no sign that she heard Awiyao, but continued to sit unmoving in the
darkness.

But
Awiyao knew that she heard him and his heart pitied her. He crawled on
all fours to the middle of the room; he knew exactly where the stove
was. With bare fingers he stirred the covered smoldering embers, and
blew into the stove. When the coals began to glow, Awiyao put pieces of
pine on them, then full round logs as his arms. The room brightened.

“Why don’t you go out,” he said, “and join the dancing women?” He
felt a pang inside him, because what he said was really not the right
thing to say and because the woman did not stir. “You should join the
dancers,” he said, “as if–as if nothing had happened.” He looked at the
woman huddled in a corner of the room, leaning against the wall. The
stove fire played with strange moving shadows and lights upon her face.
She was partly sullen, but her sullenness was not because of anger or
hate.“Go out–go out and dance. If you really
don’t hate me for this separation, go out and dance. One of the men
will see you dance well; he will like your dancing, he will marry you.
Who knows but that, with him, you will be luckier than you were with
me.”

“I don’t want any man,” she said sharply. “I don’t want any other man.”

He felt relieved that at least she talked: “You know very well that I
won’t want any other woman either. You know that, don’t you? Lumnay,
you know it, don’t you?”

She did not answer him.

“You know it Lumnay, don’t you?” he repeated.

“Yes, I know,” she said weakly.

“It is not my fault,” he said, feeling relieved. “You cannot blame me; I have been a good husband to you.”

“Neither can you blame me,” she said. She seemed about to cry.

“No, you have been very good to me. You have been a good wife. I have
nothing to say against you.” He set some of the burning wood in place.
“It’s only that a man must have a child. Seven harvests is just too long
to wait. Yes, we have waited too long. We should have another chance
before it is too late for both of us.”

This time the woman stirred, stretched her right leg out and bent her
left leg in. She wound the blanket more snugly around herself.

“You know that I have done my best,” she said. “I have prayed to Kabunyan much. I have sacrificed many chickens in my prayers.”

“Yes, I know.”

“You
remember how angry you were once when you came home from your work in
the terrace because I butchered one of our pigs without your permission?
I did it to appease Kabunyan, because, like you, I wanted to have a
child. But what could I do?”

“Kabunyan does not see fit for us to have a child,” he said. He
stirred the fire. The spark rose through the crackles of the flames. The
smoke and soot went up the ceiling.

Lumnay looked down and unconsciously started to pull at the rattan
that kept the split bamboo flooring in place. She tugged at the rattan
flooring. Each time she did this the split bamboo went up and came down
with a slight rattle. The gong of the dancers clamorously called in her
care through the walls.

Awiyao went to the corner where Lumnay sat, paused before her, looked
at her bronzed and sturdy face, then turned to where the jars of water
stood piled one over the other. Awiyao took a coconut cup and dipped it
in the top jar and drank. Lumnay had filled the jars from the mountain
creek early that evening.

“I came home,” he said. “Because I did not find you among the
dancers. Of course, I am not forcing you to come, if you don’t want to
join my wedding ceremony. I came to tell you that Madulimay, although I
am marrying her, can never become as good as you are. She is not as
strong in planting beans, not as fast in cleaning water jars, not as
good keeping a house clean. You are one of the best wives in the whole
village.”

“That has not done me any good, has it?” She said. She looked at him lovingly. She almost seemed to smile.
He
put the coconut cup aside on the floor and came closer to her. He held
her face between his hands and looked longingly at her beauty. But her
eyes looked away. Never again would he hold her face. The next day she
would not be his any more. She would go back to her parents. He let go
of her face, and she bent to the floor again and looked at her fingers
as they tugged softly at the split bamboo floor.

“This house is yours,” he said. “I built it for you. Make it your
own, live in it as long as you wish. I will build another house for
Madulimay.”

“I have no need for a house,” she said slowly. “I’ll go to my own
house. My parents are old. They will need help in the planting of the
beans, in the pounding of the rice.”

“I will give you the field that I dug out of the mountains during the
first year of our marriage,” he said. “You know I did it for you. You
helped me to make it for the two of us.”

“I have no use for any field,” she said.

He looked at her, then turned away, and became silent. They were silent for a time.

“Go back to the dance,” she said finally. “It is not right for you to
be here. They will wonder where you are, and Madulimay will not feel
good. Go back to the dance.”

“I would feel better if you could come, and dance—for the last time. The gangsas are playing.”

“You know that I cannot.”

“Lumnay,” he said tenderly. “Lumnay, if I did this it is because of
my need for a child. You know that life is not worth living without a
child. The man have mocked me behind my back. You know that.”

“I know it,” he said. “I will pray that Kabunyan will bless you and Madulimay.”

She bit her lips now, then shook her head wildly, and sobbed.

She thought of the seven harvests that had passed, the high hopes
they had in the beginning of their new life, the day he took her away
from her parents across the roaring river, on the other side of the
mountain, the trip up the trail which they had to climb, the steep
canyon which they had to cross. The waters boiled in her mind in forms
of white and jade and roaring silver; the waters tolled and growled,
resounded in thunderous echoes through the walls of the stiff cliffs;
they were far away now from somewhere on the tops of the other ranges,
and they had looked carefully at the buttresses of rocks they had to
step on—a slip would have meant death.
They both drank of the water then rested on the other bank before they made the final climb to the other side of the mountain.

She
looked at his face with the fire playing upon his features—hard and
strong, and kind. He had a sense of lightness in his way of saying
things which often made her and the village people laugh. How proud she
had been of his humor. The muscles where taut and firm, bronze and
compact in their hold upon his skull—how frank his bright eyes were. She
looked at his body that carved out of the mountains five fields for
her; his wide and supple torso heaved as if a slab of shining lumber
were heaving; his arms and legs flowed down in fluent muscles–he was
strong and for that she had lost him.

She flung herself upon his knees and clung to them. “Awiyao, Awiyao,
my husband,” she cried. “I did everything to have a child,” she said
passionately in a hoarse whisper. “Look at me,” she cried. “Look at my
body. Then it was full of promise. It could dance; it could work fast in
the fields; it could climb the mountains fast. Even now it is firm,
full. But, Awiyao, I am useless. I must die.”

“It will not be right to die,” he said, gathering her in his arms.
Her whole warm naked breast quivered against his own; she clung
now to his neck, and her hand lay upon his right shoulder; her hair
flowed down in cascades of gleaming darkness.

“I don’t care about the fields,” she said. “I don’t care about the
house. I don’t care for anything but you. I’ll have no other man.”

“Then you’ll always be fruitless.”

“I’ll go back to my father, I’ll die.”

“Then you hate me,” he said. “If you die it means you hate me. You do
not want me to have a child. You do not want my name to live on in our
tribe.”

She was silent.

“If I do not try a second time,” he explained, “it means I’ll die.
Nobody will get the fields I have carved out of the mountains; nobody
will come after me.”

“If you fail–if you fail this second time–” she said thoughtfully. The voice was a shudder. “No–no, I don’t want you to fail.”

“If I fail,” he said, “I’ll come back to you. Then both of us will
die together. Both of us will vanish from the life of our tribe.”

The gongs thundered through the walls of their house, sonorous and faraway.

“You will keep the beads. They come from far-off times. My
grandmother said they come from up North, from the slant-eyed people
across the sea. You keep them, Lumnay. They are worth twenty fields.”

“I’ll keep them because they stand for the love you have for me,” she said. “I love you. I love you and have nothing to give.”

She took herself away from him, for a voice was calling out to him
from outside. “Awiyao! Awiyao! O Awiyao! They are looking for you at the
dance!”

“I am not in a hurry.”

“The elders will scold you. You had better go.”

“Not until you tell me that it is all right with you.”

“It is all right with me.”

He clasped her hands. “I do this for the sake of the tribe,” he said.

“I know,” she said.

He went to the door.

“Awiyao!”

He stopped as if suddenly hit by a spear. In pain he turned to her.
Her face was in agony. It pained him to leave. She had been wonderful to
him. What was it that made a man wish for a child? What was it in life,
in the work in the field, in the planting and harvest, in the silence
of the night, in the communing with husband and wife, in the whole life
of the tribe itself that made man wish for the laughter and speech of a
child? Suppose he changed his mind? Why did the unwritten law demand,
anyway, that a man, to be a man, must have a child to come after him?
And if he was fruitless–but he loved Lumnay. It was like taking away
his life to leave her like this.

“Awiyao,”
she said, and her eyes seemed to smile in the light. “The beads!” He
turned back and walked to the farthest corner of their room, to the
trunk where they kept their worldly possession—his battle-ax and his
spear points, her betel nut box and her beads. He dug out from the
darkness the beads which had been given to him by his grandmother to
give to Lumnay on the beads on, and tied them in place. The white and
jade and deep orange obsidians shone in the firelight. She suddenly
clung to him, clung to his neck as if she would never let him go.

“Awiyao! Awiyao, it is hard!” She gasped, and she closed her eyes and buried her face in his neck.

The call for him from the outside repeated; her grip loosened, and he huried out into the night.

Lumnay sat for some time in the darkness. Then she went to the door
and opened it. The moonlight struck her face; the moonlight spilled
itself on the whole village.

She could hear the throbbing of the gangsas coming to her through the
caverns of the other houses. She knew that all the houses were empty
that the whole tribe was at the dance. Only she was absent. And yet was
she not the best dancer of the village? Did she not have the most
lightness and grace? Could she not, alone among all women, dance like a
bird tripping for grains on the ground, beautifully timed to the beat of
the gangsas? Did not the men praise her supple body, and the women envy
the way she stretched her hands like the wings of the mountain eagle
now and then as she danced? How long ago did she dance at her own
wedding? Tonight, all the women who counted, who once danced in her
honor, were dancing now in honor of another whose only claim was that
perhaps she could give her husband a child.

“It is not right. It is not right!” she cried. “How does she know? How can anybody know? It is not right,” she said.

Suddenly she found courage. She would go to the dance. She would go
to the chief of the village, to the elders, to tell them it was not
right. Awiyao was hers; nobody could take him away from her. Let her be
the first woman to complain, to denounce the unwritten rule that a man
may take another woman. She would tell Awiyao to come back to her. He
surely would relent. Was not their love as strong as the river?

She made for the other side of the village where the dancing was.
There was a flaming glow over the whole place; a great bonfire was
burning. The gangsas clamored more loudly now, and it seemed they were
calling to her. She was near at last. She could see the dancers clearly
now. The man leaped lightly with their gangsas as they circled the
dancing women decked in feast garments and beads, tripping on the ground
like graceful birds, following their men. Her heart warmed to the
flaming call of the dance; strange heat in her blood welled up, and she
started to run. But the gleaming brightness of the bonfire commanded her
to stop. Did anybody see her approach?

She stopped. What if somebody had seen her coming? The flames of the
bonfire leaped in countless sparks which spread and rose like yellow
points and died out in the night. The blaze reached out to her like a
spreading radiance. She did not have the courage to break into the
wedding feast.

Lumnay walked away from the dancing ground, away from the village.
She thought of the new clearing of beans which Awiyao and she had
started to make only four moons before. She followed the trail above the
village.

When she came to the mountain stream she crossed it carefully. Nobody
held her hand, and the stream water was very cold. The trail went up
again, and she was in the moonlight shadows among the trees and shrubs.
Slowly she climbed the mountain.

When Lumnay reached the clearing, she cold see from where she stood
the blazing bonfire at the edge of the village, where the wedding was.
She could hear the far-off clamor of the gongs, still rich in their
sonorousness, echoing from mountain to mountain. The sound did not mock
her; they seemed to call far to her, to speak to her in the language of
unspeaking love. She felt the pull of their gratitude for her sacrifice.
Her heartbeat began to sound to her like many gangsas.

Lumnay
thought of Awiyao as the Awiyao she had known long ago– a strong,
muscular boy carrying his heavy loads of fuel logs down the mountains to
his home. She had met him one day as she was on her way to fill her
clay jars with water. He had stopped at the spring to drink and rest;
and she had made him drink the cool mountain water from her coconut
shell. After that it did not take him long to decide to throw his spear
on the stairs of her father’s house in token on his desire to marry her.

The mountain clearing was cold in the freezing moonlight. The wind
began to stir the leaves of the bean plants. Lumnay looked for a big
rock on which to sit down. The bean plants now surrounded her, and she
was lost among them.

A few more weeks, a few more months, a few more harvests—what did it
matter? She would be holding the bean flowers, soft in the texture,
silken almost, but moist where the dew got into them, silver to look at,
silver on the light blue, blooming whiteness, when the morning comes.
The stretching of the bean pods full length from the hearts of the
wilting petals would go on.